The 411 on How to Use Foursquare

Gallery Night is days away, and a few of my colleagues and I want to play Foursquare with you Friday night.

Foursquare is a mobile social networking game for smart phones -- including iPhones, BlackBerry, Android and Palm devices -- that lets you share your location with friends. The game is pretty simple: download and install the app, set up and account, find friends and then start "checking in" into different venues around town to score points and unlock what are essentially virtual merit badges. But what makes Foursquare and similar services really interesting is that you can discover new places, find out what's popular and get discounts from restaurants, bars and other digital coupons through the service.

This social game seems like a perfect one to play during an event when so many people are out and about and moving place to place, and a few of us in the newsroom are curious to see how well Foursquare and Gallery Night play together. So we've set up a collective Foursqure account that you can be friends with after installing the app. During Gallery Night on Friday, art critic Mary Louise Schumacher, online producer and blogger Alison Sherwood and education writer Erin Richards will check in from different galleries using Foursquare. Find them, meet them and maybe get a cool surprise. Oh, I am participating in this too.. We're all using the same account, but as part of each check in we'll announce who is where -- the app lets you Tweet a short message as part of the check-in process.

Schumacher and I tried this Gallery Night Foursquare game with readers in January with some success, but we'd like to build it out a bit and see where it goes. Some readers told us then that they had trouble installing and setting up Foursquare, so we've revived the old TechWatch video segment to offer a couple of walkthroughs showing what you need to do.